Straight forward tutorials for tech minded people.
While my haircut should be illegal in this photo, it’s the grainy screen in the background is what is becoming increasingly illegal here in the United States. This is me. Somewhere around 14 years old, hunched over a desk covered in screws, cables, and whatever else I could scrounge. The picture is grainy. The desk (and my hair) is a mess. But the feeling I had in that moment was very real: I just…
Back in 2020, I published my first Shopify app. My goal was simple: generate some side income to fund my future son’s college bills. I’ve already written about that. . 5 years later, I’m now working full time on my apps. It’s been a hell of a ride. Replacing my income with app revenue once seemed like an improbable dream. Now it’s my full time reality. It all hit me when my newest Shopify swag…
Probably like you, my expertise came from an engineering background - not marketing, which is why I choose to build apps on the Shopify platform. One of the highest moments is getting that first install and subscription. This quick highs then fade into long nagging questions, like “but wait, how was my app found”? Then the anxiety of _“is my app listing doing OK in the competitive marketplace?”…
Just last week, my I went to launch my development environment powered by Gitpod to fix a quick bug on one of my apps. However, to my dismay, I found my paid account was now blocked without any recourse. I was effectively blocked from running my trusty development environment for the better part of the day. Eventually after sending several emails and messages over Discord, the Gitpod team realized…
Recently, Shopify has removed the total_price_usd field from their Admin Order API. This caused me a big headache personally. Long story short, now I had to find a way to quickly convert orders back into USD. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find a currency conversion API in Shopify, but I did find an API that offered a free tier. Open Exchange Rates offers 1,000 calls per month for free. Great. But in…
Recently both Twitter and Reddit have effectively killed their APIs to the public. Much to the chagrin of their users. A handful of the most popular subreddits like /r/videos, /r/reactiongifs and /r/lifeprotips are staging a protest by voluntarily shutting down June ; some even threating to shut down permanently. This new user hostile policy will also end 3rd party clients to Reddit as well,…
Shopify Devs sent me a package of swag, and I feel like I must reciprocate as best I can. This is the story of how I finally built and shipped my first actual revenue generating app. The year was 2020, a dark and infamous year of course; but simultaneously a golden age of side projects. I was a dad to be and with faced with a lot of time to think about the future. The small, teeny tiny motivation…
Why would you want to be alerted when a Shopify store installs, subscribes or uninstalls your Shopify app? Well when you’re finding some time off, enjoying a beer or just away from the laptop it’s always nice to see your app working for you. On the flip side, knowing when a merchant uninstalls your app gives you a chance to immediately respond with a personalized message to try and win them back.…
I just wanted to make a quick write up on the next team I’ve joined and the product we’re building - Pipedream . What is Pipedream? In layman’s terms, Pipedream is a workflow builder. It’s a platform where you can build workflows from a series of pre-built steps - or build your own. For example, with just a few clicks in Pipedream you can build a workflow to listen for a specific hashtag on…
Enumerated values are not people friendly Frameworks typically don’t include this kind of method out of the box with Strings. If you have an an emum of machine level names, naturally you want to use underscores and lowercases to keep it machine friendly: class Vehicle enum vehicle_type: %i(car truck semi_truck motorcyle) end If you ever wanted to print out the vehicle_type in a string, your users…